Entries tagged with nanowrimo

Maybe I'll just try to work my way up to posting twice a month, and see how that works out. /o\

femslashex happened! I wrote a Sinbad (Nala/Rina) treat for muccamukk, which is to say I've had an idea sitting half-written in my head since last femslashex, having watched Sinbad at all solely after reading muccamukk's letter that year, and then she asked for it again and this time I was able to write the story down fast enough to meet the deadline. \o/ One of these days I'm going to have to get around to a set of Sinbad posts - it's such an adorably terrible show! Things I enjoyed large parts of but really want to tweak are always the ones I get most fannish about. I'd do a recs post except I still haven't read everything I have open in tabs, but basically if you haven't checked the collection for anything in your fandoms, you totally should.

Not caught up yet on SHIELD; I'm also watching Forever and portions of Flash mostly for the hell of it, no real commentary to offer there.

I'm doing NaNoWriMo, but not precisely by the rules, because I'm counting words I write for Yuletide; so far this is working out well, and I may even wholly avoid bears this year. (My recipient and I could not have more divergent approaches to Yuletide if we were trying! This has proven exciting but wholly manageable, and as a bonus I should have plenty of time to edit my assignment/work on treats. \o/)

By contrast, I have almost nothing whatsoever to say about Sleepy Hollow because basically I'm just enjoying the ride. (I haven't seen the most recent ep, I don't think.) Are there plot holes? Sure there are! But the more recent episodes have been much less faily than the first couple, and ABBIE. ABBIE AND JENNY. ICHABOD. CAPTAIN IRVING. The end. *hands*

Not dead, just recovering - Sandy was very kind to my area, we didn't even lose power. But there is a funny sort of tension in being a safe state on the border of a swing state, and for a bunch of weekends and the four days leading up to Tuesday (and on Tuesday itself) I was volunteering for Democrats in New Hampshire. (Who did extremely well, New Hampshire is now ruled by women.) I stayed up until 3 a.m. watching the results and then slept like a log; everyone in Florida and Ohio and wherever else who put up with those lines is my hero. And I would like to apologize to everybody on the canvassing list who got hit a zillion times - they don't tell volunteers whether a house has been hit before, it's not our fault!

But: other things happened besides voting, although they were just a bit less important.

I'm not caught up on Elementary or Burn Notice, but I will have aaaaaaall the free time this weekend, and I'll probably only spend half of it panicking about my Yuletide fic. :D And NaNo! I put the bar code from last year somewhere, I'll have to dig that up, but so far it's going quite well.

Posting fail, ugh, but I hope everybody to whom it is relevant had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and that everybody more generally had a wonderful Thursday. I am thankful for so many things I could never list them all, so probably it's a good thing that I sort of missed the boat for attempting a long eloquent Thanksgiving post.

Having vacation was AWESOME, and yet, as vacations so often are, it was not long enough. But! I got a bunch of stuff done, if not everything I'd hoped to get done.

First:

50,217 / 50,000 words. 100.0% done!

\o/! I have no idea what I'm going to do with this thing, but there are WAY better odds than usual that I'm going to finish it, simply because I (still) somehow don't hate it. I mean, it's clunky and kind of awkward and there's probably continuity errors eeeeeeverywhere, but that's okay! I wrote a thing! \o/!

I cast my OTW election ballot this morning, and just wanted to add something to my last post, because rydra_wong has a point: I also am so so grateful to the people who came forward this election cycle and shared experiences that must have been really difficult to share - for many reasons, but in part because their willingness to do that allowed me to vote with a level of thought and care and deliberation that would not have been possible otherwise. My profession of love toward the OTW was not meant to invalidate those posts. Re: just about everything else, the_shoshanna is more articulate than I could ever be.

There's no way to segue from that to a squeeful book review gracefully, so I'm just going to go for it. ( Blackdog, by KV Johansen. )

I would like ALL THE FIC to fill in the timeskips and backstories plzkthx. By which I mean I'll probably acquire my own epic headcanon without even trying.

Which brings me to: yaaaaaaay Yuletide! :D :D :D :D :D

Oh, and:

28,953 / 50,000 words. 57.9% done!

I need to stop talking about how well this is going, or I'm going to jinx myself.

Honestly? I'm a little weirded out by how well this NaNo is going. Maybe it's because I slept for shit all weekend (parents gone to Maine = I was the one stuck getting up to let the cat in at two in the morning) and I shouldn't be reading ANYTHING right now, but so far I am keeping up on the wordcount and I don't hate it? I don't even know how that's possible. o_O I think I did myself a favor not outlining all that strictly, because it means I don't have to revise the outline much when I change something, or write something I wasn't expecting to write. But, seriously. This is weird.

So I got sick! Which actually was good timing, in a certain sense, because in between naps that added up to like eighteen hours of yesterday, I actually got pretty far on my NaNo. Sometimes being sick is weirdly facilitating to my writing - somehow it can temporarily lower the barrier between the not-words floating around in my head and the actual words I need to be putting down on the page. \o? Obviously I'm not quite done for today, but I think I can manage another paragraph or two this evening, if I don't just conk out on the couch the second I get home. (It's original fiction; I promised daemonelix a looooong time ago that I would reserve NaNo for origfic, because I write fanfic the whole rest of the year. :D)

I am also watching Prime Suspect, but I have less to say about that except that I like Maria Bello, and also it makes me want to check out the original. I like watching cranky people be cranky and then also do their jobs, and since I am hitting my oversaturation point on most other police shows, it's nice to have one where I haven't had this ep on in the background while reading/eating dinner/writing fic twenty times already.

And Burn Notice is back tonight yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. ♥♥♥♥♥ Once I hit a certain level of affection for something, I am incapable of ever being objective about it again. Ever.

So we got about four inches of snow, which is way less than a lot of people, and yet we still somehow lost power this weekend - off and on, even, which meant I had to drag myself out of bed at like 5:00 AM yesterday to turn off lights and yet when I woke up for real there was no power. :P

But! It came back on with plenty of time for me to post one of my complements and also my fic for thelittlebang, although it looks like the fic post is still trapped somewhere in the moderation queue. I tried really hard to not write the same story again, because, let's face it, there are a lot of ways Avatar-the-movie could be improved; but I probably repeated myself at least a little. /o\

But I still feel very accomplished! Two big bangs within a week of each other! Granted, my genretwisting bingo has fallen by the wayside; one story, I'm trashing and replacing with something else, and the other grew a zombie army and is 16k and climbing, so there's no way I'm going to get that done before the deadline of ... um, today, but. I'm still planning to finish them even if it won't "count" officially because I'm a rebel.

NaNo starts tomorrow! OMG I AM EXCITE. :DDDDDDDDD I'm sure there will be angst and pain later, but right before the first of November I am always filled with joy and sunshine and puppies. I have so many things to finish, I really shouldn't be doing it; but it's a tradition! I've done NaNo every year since high school, I can't just not. I am going to be watching the homepage countdown alllllll day.

Gnargh. I only had two days off; how is it so hard to be back at work again? :P

On the plus side, though: NANO WORDCOUNT ACHIEVED. **fistpump** It's total crap, and it makes no sense if you try to read it through, because there are all these chunks missing and maybe a quarter of it should probably be in a sequel. But it's written, dammit. \o/

On the I-don't-even-know side, I may have gone through the spreadsheet of Dear Yulegoat letters, and I may have bookmarked all the ones with fandoms I feel I could write for, in anticipation of maybe writing someone a treat. I ... may also have accidentally written almost 3,000 words of fic based off one prompt. Hahahaoops.

H50 was a repeat, but I think The Event was new - or at least my mother and I missed it when it showed originally, so it was as though it were new. ( Cut for griping. )

And yet I can't quite hate it; which is for the best, because my mom is still hooked.

Now I have to finish fixing up the Dead Moms and triple-check it for posting tomorrow. D: omgsonervous.

It was pouring at 4 am when I had to wake up and separate two fighting cats; it sleeted somewhere in between then and now, coating all the delicate little branches on the bushes outside, and all the needles of the pines, with ice; and now it is snowing, giant fat flakes falling almost fast enough to look like rain. I'm supposed to go meet up with M, J, K, Ka, and Q - and possibly a friend of J's from school, the prospect of whom fills me with terror - for lunch, so I ought to hope it stops soon, but I'm willing to drive carefully as long as it keeps snowing and sticking. :D

The tablet has arrived, as have the books I ordered; I'd forgotten just how long it's been since I'd drawn anything. I have giant flashing neon failure issues, and my sister is so much better at art things than I am that I have a feeble love/hate thing going on with drawing - even when something comes out half-decent, it's never quite good enough for something off in the back of my brain. Luckily, when I show her things I write, she likes to draw for them, so the pictures I wish I could put on paper still end up there most of the time. \o/

I would put a big poetical list of things I'm thankful for here, except I'm thankful for so many things it kind of defies belief, and making a list would just make me think of more and more. In summary, though: my family, friends, job, fandoms, and life are all more awesome than I usually give them credit for, and I am grateful for all the small sources of joy in between. ♥♥♥♥♥

And the TV is broken again. **weeps** I didn't appreciate it functioning enough, I guess; or else I was just blithely assuming the roofing guys would keep fiddling with the cable at the end of every day to keep it working. We tried to fiddle with the cable ourselves, but it didn't help. The actual TV repair people are supposed to come by today - not soon enough to get me prompt Burn Notice, of course, but I'm betting USA will re-air the eps I've missed. This thing where I have to limit the amount of video I watch online is just killing me. :P

I am - mostly successfully, at the moment - juggling my NaNo with racking up more Newsies cliché bingo fic bits. /o\ The NaNo has, as always, gotten kind of unfocused in the process; when I get stuck, I tend to take that as a sign that I need to add a new plot thread, so I am acquiring open plot arcs at a sort of ridiculous rate. Still have a few spare days in there, though, so if I just work through Thanksgiving, I should be able to finish the fifty thousand words just fine - if not, you know, the story. I am so bad at actually completing my NaNos. :P

As for Newsies, I guess I'll just have to give in and let it own my soul for a while. New fandom love is like the Borg: resistance is futile.

Oh, and: snow! Probably won't stick all day, it was really just a dusting, but it did manage to actually accumulate on the ground. :D

Okay, so matching my NaNo word-for-word with ItO is not going to happen. Long shot anyway. But switching off between the two seems to be doing wonders, as long as I make sure I stay on my NaNo for enough total writing time to get to the word goal for the day. \o/

The NaNo's awful, obviously, because I've barely planned it and I'm still shuffling names and character attributes, and I'm sure it's going to get horrid and preachy and anvilicious because I have ~thoughts~ about the genre. But! So far, I'm enjoying the writing, and it's pacifying my mother, who, despite losing a couple small arguments with me about the merits of fanfic, still nags me about getting something original written. (Besides the dwarf pirate captain story, which ... still isn't done. I should really go back and clean that up some.)

I also finally got a movie I had not watched before from Netflix, which was Newsies - yes, that musical where tiny!Batman sings about Santa Fe. I had never seen it before yesterday, despite having run across The Refuge and devoured everything in it several years ago. And ... wow. Terrible timing, because the absolute last thing I need right now is a new fandom, but that movie is ridiculous, in the best possible way. Oh, god, the dancing.

I actually had a Newsies dream last night, which is the shortest transition ever from the initial media to my subconscious. (Although, granted, the fact that I read the fics probably gave it a bit of a head start.) And Christian Bale's New York accent is just precious.

NaNoWriMo! There was never a moment where I quite forgot, but it somehow managed to sneak up on me anyway. I'm going to do my best to get the same number of words down on ItO every day as I write for my NaNo, although who knows whether I'll be able to keep that up all month. D:

I am SO RELIEVED to have Chapter Seven out; now that I don't have to feel guilty about it anymore, I can post again! \o/ I cut out all the nonessential scenes I was considering in my outline, and it still ended up being 11k. Clearly, by the time I hit Book Four, every chapter's going to be like 50k. D: Let's just hope Chapter Eight doesn't also take a month. I was hoping to do an original fic for NaNo - I hadn't quite decided between self-indulgent dragonrider story or Austenesque steampunk romance - but maybe, just maybe, I should work on ItO instead. 50,000 words should be close to enough to finish Book One, if future chapters don't balloon on me too much.

Part of the reason I am so torn is M; we have a writing exchange system that, at least recently, has been kind of tipped in her favor, but she's simultaneously great at making me feel guilty for not having sent her anything recently and incredibly difficult to nag herself. For her sake, I want to work on the HP AU, because I haven't gotten a chapter of that done in ages; for my own sake, I want to finish ItO, because I adore writing it and there are so many things that still need to happen; and for the sake of the official rules of NaNo, I want to start something new. And, of course, always in the background are the Dead Mom Fics; I never stop wanting to work on those. **hands**

Mostly, I think Ka just doesn't think about this shit before she says it, because her friends at school don't call her on any of it. I hope that's it, or our quasi-friendship is headed nowhere nice.

We also saw someone I used to know in high school, who, at that time, was a giant creeper. I have no idea what he's like now, to be fair, but I'm not super interested in finding out, either. It was weird to see him again, and I had to explain the whole backstory to Ka, since she had already left school by the time the whole extended thing with this guy went down. :P

But! It was a beautiful day; we mostly hung out and talked, which was great despite the issues noted above, and I bought myself a lovely little pumpkin. It was also nice to go back to Cedar Circle again. I'll admit that I had maybe been avoiding it a little, and I think it was feeding my failure issues, so it was good to have a reason to go there. Closure, or something.

And now I should probably stop taking breaks to write this, and get back to work. :D Or at least use my spare moments to work on Chapter Eight, instead.

Looks like it's storydump time once again; my classes have picked up ever so slightly, possibly because the professors can all sense Thanksgiving inching closer, and combined with all the proofing of other people's papers I've somehow ended up doing (AT asks me to check over her Spanish papers! I don't even know Spanish!), some of my copious free time has started slipping out of my grasp.

Which is ironic, considering that I was bored in September, and now NaNo is coming up. Oh, life.

As has recently become my SOP, I let her know what I thought, although not with the kind of language or at the kind of volume I might have liked. Br came down very firmly on my side later, which was a relief, but B still insists the movie was funny, which kind of makes me want to cry.

I did not know it was possible to be "too PC" for Vermont, of all states.

The interesting thing is that I wasn't being PC. Perhaps this is just me, but that term tends to connote more calculation than anything else, when I hear it - you are being PC if you are careful or are telling other people to be careful what you/they say because you are worried that a member of some kind of minority will one day overhear and be offended by it. And I'm pretty sure that used to be what I was doing, at least in some cases. But somewhere in the last few years, I've managed to grow a brain, and now it's more about stopping things because they are actively offending me, not because they have the potential to offend somebody else. I mean, I still want to make sure that I speak up when I see something that might bother somebody who isn't me, because it's better than nothing even if it speaks to an enormous lack of empathy on my part, but most of the time, now, I am offended. That attitude toward rape bothers me immensely; and, yes, partly it bothers me kind of on behalf of anyone who has ever been sexually assaulted, but mostly it just bothers me, even though I am not a member of that group (... yet, I suppose I should say, considering the odds). That attitude toward gay men, likewise, bothers me, even though the odds are very long that I will ever be a gay man, and I am terribly lacking in gay male friends.

... And now I need to stop talking about this, because I'm getting progressively less able to communicate my point, and also if I don't stop I am going to be hugely grouchy and sharp with B when she comes back.

On the more amusing end of the spectrum of stupid I've encountered recently, there was a boy in my World Literature class who ended up taking control of the class discussion, and moved it kind of abruptly away from the Aeneid and toward the value of war. ... In a sense where he said, "I'm okay with America becoming a violent empire that takes over the world if it means I'm going to be wealthy and happy," almost verbatim. He quoted Sean Hannity on the matter of America being the greatest nation God ever put on the earth, unironically. He actually told the class that it was a good thing the French, the English, and the Germans had been such good "warriors" (yes, that is the word he used), because otherwise America wouldn't be here - they wouldn't have been able to clear out all those Amerindians who were in their way, after all.

It pretty much went like this:

CRAZY BOY: **talks a boatload of ridiculousness**REST OF THE CLASS: ... there is not enough D: in the WORLD.ONE AWESOME KID IN THE CORNER WHOM I NOW ♥: Well, he did quote Sean Hannity. I mean, what were we expecting, after that?

Basically, the AKitC (Awesome Kid in the Corner) saved the whole incident from being something that it would make me sad inside to remember, and turned it into a reasonably amusing anecdote to tell people. ♥, AKitC. ♥.

I'm still going to mass on Sunday afternoons - I really, really enjoy the singing, although I'm still a little nervous that somebody's going to get weird about me being in the choir, and it's interesting to listen to the sermons. Sometimes I almost feel like the sermon ruins the day's reading, because the passages from the Bible are so eloquent they pretty much speak for themselves. And there is always the occasional awkward moment - last Sunday, for example, the reading was from the end of Mark 10, the passage about the blind man named Bartimaeus asking to be healed. The ... priest? I am still not sure about my terminology - went a little overboard in imagining the awfulness of being blind; I was with him on it being something of a shame to never see the faces of your parents, but the look of love in somebody's eyes strikes me as kind of take-it-or-leave-it (wouldn't the sound of love in somebody's voice, or the feel of love in somebody's touch, be pretty amazing?), and he totally lost me on the blind missing out on the "fullness of being a human person" [sic]. I was expecting him to go on to something like never seeing the colors of a sunset, not, you know, somehow not being a complete person. o.O

Also, I still have trouble not laughing when the bells ring during the transubstantiation (and why do I know that word and not what the guy who talks is called?); I know this is awful of me, but it seriously does sound like the background sound effect for a moment of truly terrible SFX from an old episode of The Twilight Zone, or something.

The HP AU is ever so slowly inching its way toward completion. I'm trying to get a decent chunk of it done before NaNo starts, but it is dawning on some part of my subconscious that when I finish it - well, when I finish it I'm going to edit it, natch, until it is less awful, but at some point after that, I'm going to ... post it. Probably on the Pit, first, although I'd like to have it here, too, just for the sake of having all my fannishness in one place (with tags!). Other people (besides M and my sister) will be able to see it. /o\ I ... I don't know about this whole "writing" thing.

And, of course, it doesn't help that NaNo is starting to take over my brain. The odds are on a sequel to last year: this time, instead of thwarting the massive evil plot of a clockwork company in AU!Britain, my dwarf airship pirate captain and her trusty crew will most likely be fighting demons in AU!India. And possibly borrowing a goddess's hammer to do a little smashing; we'll see.

Aaaaaaaand now that I'm done with this giant wall of text, I should go get dinner. \o/

My birthday was Monday; sadly, it was not wholly stress-free, since I had to do an interview, but it was pretty close. I got an early present over the weekend, so that some birthdaying could be done while my dad was still at home - it turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous antique typewriter, whose only flaw is that its spacebar is a little bit overenthusiastic. (Also the part where I can't save anything is very weird. There's no Ctrl key! I am so lost!) Bonus: I now understand why the Shift key is so named.

On my actual birthday, I got only one more present - my sister's present for me hasn't arrived yet, but that just means when I do get it (this weekend, I'm hoping) I'll have plenty of time to watch enjoy it. Whatever it is. Because I don't know. **cough**

Anyway. I got a Polaroid camera - the sort I remember from grade school, where the teacher took pictures and everybody fought over who got to wave it around 'til it developed. My mom went all old school on me this year. :D The cake was awesome, as always.

A few more wildlife encounters to document, also. The fuzzy cheerful one would be a very close pass by a deer in the car, going up the lower curve of the road my house is on; it was standing right by the guardrail, staring over it at me with its enormous eyes. The somewhat less pleasant one would be the one where Calvin caught a squirrel at the end of the walk, and, well. Suffice it to say that it did not end especially well for the squirrel, who now presumably roams the Great Pine Tree in the sky.

A BAFA is not quite a diploma, if I'm remembering correctly; it's more like some kind of youth leadership certificate. A ZUP is a zone à urbaniser en priorité, a "priority urbanization zone", which doesn't really condense to any succinct English phrase I can think of ("slum" has something of the same feel to it, the same sort of connotation, judging by the way one of my French teachers explained it, but it's not the right word - and, of course, the denotations are totally different).

Not necessarily hugely significant; but it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, to realize that they were presenting a holder of a lot of different kinds of privilege as the Big Bad, and ... well, various less-privileged kinds of people as God. I'm pretty ridiculously areligious, but JoA's God has a way of moving me unexpectedly.

Also, Lilly the ex-nun? SO MUCH LOVE. I have a kind of enormous girlcrush on her.

Aside from that, I poked a little at a few things today. Got past a minor stumbling block on the HP AU, which was satisfying, and prodded my NaNo along a little further. Since it was raining so much today, I ended up not going to work; I stayed home on the couch with the cat, and also made a batch of brownies.

The short of it is that I've decided to stop working at Cedar Circle. I wish I hadn't had to, because I loved doing the work itself - planting and weeding and thinning and hoeing, getting my hands dirty and feeling like I'd really gotten something done by the end of the day. But I have SO MUCH to do this summer: thesis research, and an online class, plus extra-curricular studying (both thesis-related and not). After a week, it became pretty obvious that I just plain can't afford to be working forty-hour weeks at a job that leaves me wrung out and unwilling to get off the couch at the end of the day. :P

So. I've found myself another job - similar, in certain ways, but I get to choose my own hours, and also it should be a little bit less physically demanding. It's weeding; weeding an enormous slope that used to be a garden, and possibly still has some garden-y plants hiding in it somewhere, for a lovely older lady who is wheelchair-bound. She can still manage a little in the lower garden, but the slope is too much - very steep, and mostly shale, so it can also be pretty slippery. I'm looking forward to it, I think it should suit much better than the other.

I've had a lot of spare time, in between the last job ending and this job starting - watched a lot of NCIS, which I am coming to deeply adore, and a fair amount of House, too. USA is rapidly becoming one of my favorite channels - and not just because BURN NOTICE IS TOTALLY COMING BACK THURSDAY OMFGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. I'm also thinking I may try out Royal Pains, which is apparently premiering right after Burn Notice, if I remember the commercials rightly; the previews look rife with potential brothercest, and also the assistant woman looks totally awesome. ("... Don't objectify me, sidekick.")

I've also written more; I added some to the official HP AU document, and also the Irrelevant Shipfic is up to twenty-five pages. **facepalm** I also keep getting hit with mildly random stuff - a bit of Cain/Glitch, and a conversation between Myers and Hellboy over dishwashing. ... Yeah. I'm still working on finishing and shining up my NaNo, but I keep getting distracted by world-building stuff; at the moment, at least, it's a lot more fun to work out the alternate history of the setting than it is to actually write in the missing bits of the actual story.

In short, as always, the background is running away with me. :D It's good experience, though - and good to know that when I really want to, I actually can be moved to bother with this kind of stuff. I'm betting this NaNo won't be the last one I write in this particular universe; because of the way the world is put together, it lends itself to both steampunk and swords-and-sorcery, which, what more could you want?

Hopefully, having more time and not spending as much of it being exhausted will lend itself to an improvement in my posting record; my streak has been decimated. :D